1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to processing of forms. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for processing form images by generating an overlay of strokes from multiple forms to automatically identify fields, by detecting labels in the form images that are associated with fields and analyzing the fields and labels to increase accuracy.
2. Description of the Background Art
The use of portable computing devices has become commonplace for many users. In addition to having a conventional desktop computer, many users also have some type of portable computing device. Examples of present-day computing devices include electronic devices for reading such as the Reader from Sony Corp., the Kindle from Amazon and the Nook from Barnes & Noble. As memory size becomes smaller, people are increasingly foregoing laptops for tablets, such as the iPad from Apple Computer Inc., the Kindle Fire from Amazon and the Galaxy Tab from Samsung. Smaller portable computing devices such as smartphones are also useful because of their portability. Smartphones include the iPhone from Apple Computer Inc., the Droid from Motorola and the Blackberry from Research in Motion, just to name a few.
Portable computing devices can be used to input information into forms. Users will input information using a stylus and optical character recognition (OCR) or optical mark recognition (OMR) is applied to the strokes to convert them into text. One particular problem with this prior art approach, however, is that the process of converting the strokes into text is error prone and the user has no way of knowing that the conversion to symbolic data is incorrect. In addition, many items on the forms are needlessly run through the OCR or OMR process when only a certain subset of the strokes needs to be converted. Lastly, the forms are typically processed by identifying the form, extracting information about the fields and performing actions on the form. This process is time consuming, complicated and can easily result in errors. As a result, the prior art provides a very complicated and problematic process for receiving data and analyzing forms.